Mademoiselle Chanel (14 page)

M
y
maison de couture
in Biarritz was to be my pièce de résistance, the resort’s first fashion house in the center of town, located on the rue Gardères in the castlelike structure of the Villa Larralde. It faced the casino, en route to the beach promenade—a prime location, certain to attract the wealthiest visitors. In order to satisfy their demand for innovation and style, I had to offer more upscale apparel without sacrificing my code of utility and simplicity. However, with the war in full force, obtaining adequate supplies of fabric was an issue.

“I’ll put you in touch with suppliers of Scottish wools,” said Boy before he left, having deposited an enormous sum for me to draw upon. “You should also contact Balsan’s brothers in Lyons. Their family textile plants are churning out broadcloth in bales for the army. Balsan is always offering to help you. Let this be his contribution to the cause.”

He didn’t seem to mind that we were seizing advantage from chaos. I voiced doubts about such an undertaking, wondering how I’d manage three shops, much less deliver merchandise as the war raged on. Boy shrugged my concerns aside. “You didn’t start the war. Anyone who can seeks profit in it; why shouldn’t we? I certainly intend to emerge from this fiasco richer than when I started. Frankly, if we don’t, others will—and in fact, already are.”

I contacted Balsan, who was willing to send whatever I required and put the family silk stock at my disposal, as well. Through him, I located a manufacturer named Rodier who had developed a raw jersey for sportsmen’s underwear. His samples had proved too scratchy, leaving him with a sizeable quantity he could not sell. I requested everything he had and placed an order for more. With the samples he sent, I made frock coats in its natural cream and beige hues, with discreet embroidery on the sleeves and linings of Balsan silk. They sold within hours. Soon thereafter, I received my next order. Rodier had modified the product with cotton, at my suggestion, so it would be more malleable, and dyed it in colors I requested: coral, azure, shades of gray and cream. I presented a new line of dresses, cardigans, and coats, some in the wools Boy had arranged for me, trimming my collars and sleeve cuffs with available pelts like rabbit, squirrel, or skunk (importing fur from Russia or South America was now impossible and locally produced skins bolstered the economy at home). I accessorized these ensembles with new suede and felt hats in various shapes, banded in velvet or broadcloth, with faux-pearl pins.

I could barely keep up with the demand. Orders came from as far as Madrid, as aristocratic Spanish women returned home from Biarritz carrying luggage stuffed with my garb, prompting envious friends to rush my store. I even had a massive order from the Spanish royal family, with the infantas photographed strolling through El Prado in my dresses and coats.

I hired sixty seamstresses and dispatched urgent word to Antoinette to find her replacement for rue Cambon and come to Biarritz as soon as possible. I also wrote to Adrienne, who demurred because Maurice was on leave from the front. I gritted my teeth at his poor timing and searched locally for someone to oversee the workroom.

Enter Madame Deray. She was another Lucienne, a veteran of the craft—imperious, demanding, and indefatigable. We clashed from the moment we met, when she criticized the excessive formlessness of my silhouettes. I hired her on the spot. She, in turn, brought in more help and took charge with an iron fist. She had mouths to feed, a large family of cousins and aunts who had lost men in the war. Her salary was adequate
but I promised a raise if she could increase production. She did. She worked harder than I did, mastering the latest sewing machines and supervising the legion of seamstresses who created our clothes even as she personally oversaw each client fitting, often the first to arrive and the last to leave. We never became friends, but I relied on her as I had on none of my other
premières,
for I knew that whenever I needed to depart from Biarritz to attend to my other businesses, I left my
maison
in the best of hands.

Antoinette arrived with a sullen air. When I asked what ailed her, she muttered, “I’m twenty-eight, Gabrielle, and now you want me to manage this salon in a resort that empties in winter. How am I to find a husband? You have Boy. I have no one.”

“No one?” I exclaimed, taken aback by her petulance. “You have me. You are my sister. Would you call what we are building here nothing?”

She pouted. “What
you
are building. I am only your employee. I want to marry one day and have a family of my own. Don’t you? It is what’s expected of us.”

“Who expects it?” I flared. “I certainly do not. If you so desire a husband, where else to find him than here in Biarritz, where rich men abound? As for me, I’m married already—to my work.”

I turned on my heel and left her, exasperated that even as I worked my fingers to the bone to liberate women from our cloth chains, our minds remained as closed as ever to the possibility that we might deserve more than a husband, children, and growing old cooking sausage.

I left Biarritz at the end of the season to supervise my other shops and prepare a new line of clothes for the spring. Antoinette sulked that she had to stay behind at my insistence; my new establishment needed tending in the off-season, as winter visitors from Spain often arrived.

As I rode the express to Paris in a first-class compartment where I could stretch my legs and review my accounts (my first season in Biarritz had yielded unbelievable profit, thanks to Madame Deray, who priced my dresses at 3,000 francs apiece). I marveled that Antoinette could have thought I’d ever entertain such a notion as marriage. I had never broached the subject with her or anyone else, not even Boy . . .

It is what’s expected of us.

It might be expected but I was more unsettled by the fact that now I couldn’t stop thinking about it, nor wonder once again, as I had with Balsan, if something was wrong with me that I didn’t crave what so many others of my gender did. Why did I not desire the comforts of an established home, of a husband and children running underfoot? Had my own childhood damaged me in some way that I rejected the very things that made women happy?

I was thirty-two years old. By 1916, I had three hundred employees on my payroll and was deemed a rising figure in fashion. America’s premier magazines,
Women’s Wear Daily
and
Harper’s Bazaar,
ran articles heralding my latest skirt length, which daringly allowed a glimpse of ankle and upper calf. Even that bastion of credibility,
Vogue,
had featured my designs and declared me “the designer to watch.”

Conformity was the last thing I should ever want.

THE WAR CONTINUED
to slaughter men like a thresher scything wheat. Boy returned to Paris on leave, looked fitter than the last time but was cryptic about his duties. I suspected he acted as an intelligence officer for the English, but, as had been established since the start of our relationship, I did not ask.

He was delighted to find me thriving, to read the magazine clippings I showed him, even if thus far no established French fashion publication had given me their stamp of approval. He had finished his book and it would be published in England—again, I didn’t inquire as to how or where he’d found the time to write. To celebrate, we went out on the town.

Paris was regaining some of its faded allure. We had grown accustomed to war and while everyone lamented the shortages it caused—the lack of consistent hot water being the worst for me—the bistros and cabarets helped to ease our deprivations, filled with officers on leave from every nation, drinking and romancing gullible girls. Boy and I dined at Maxim’s
and the Café de Paris; we attended the theater and were even invited to a society dinner by the actress Cécile Sorel, who frequented my shops and had been presented to me by my fearless champion Baroness Rothschild.

It was at this dinner where I met Misia.

HER HOME ON THE RUE DE RIVOLI
overlooking the Tuileries was like a tinker’s shop—if tinkers collected masses of African masks and primitive statuettes, porcelain bric-a-brac from Russia, gilded English tea tables, antique busts from Italy, and dozens of paintings and sketches by every working and unknown artist in Paris. “Is it all for sale?” Boy whispered to me as we weaved our way through the detritus. He was appalled; his tastes always bordered on the traditionally austere. He had trouble tearing his gaze away from a black marble reproduction of Michelangelo’s
David
propped in a corner, festooned with discarded hats, scarves, and coats.

“Here is a portrait Toulouse-Lautrec made of me at the piano,” Misia said, pointing at the painting crammed between twenty others hanging in haphazard array on the wall. “I’m an accomplished pianist, taught by Franz Liszt himself. I used to give lessons. I first trained in St. Petersburg, where I was born. Oh, Lautrec was such a divine little man,” she went on. “How they made fun of him! As if they could ever have seen the world with half his sensitivity. I was so sorry when he died.” And: “This is Renoir. I posed for him. He wanted me to show my breasts and I regret to this day that I declined. No man knew better how to capture the sheen of a woman’s skin. Oh, and this is my latest acquisition: Van Gogh. Do you know him? No? He was brilliant. Just look at his palette; he bathed in color. Forget Botticelli and Da Vinci; such rubbish, so antiquated! This man was the soul of divinity. It’s a crime that talent often goes hand in hand with insanity.” She sighed. “He killed himself. Not only was he as mad as a war widow but he didn’t understand the first thing about selling his work. Even if he had, no one knew what to do with it. They couldn’t figure out whether to hang his paintings upside down or not.”

Sheet music drifted in her wake, her piano heaped with annotated scores by Stravinsky, Ravel, and Debussy, all of whom, Misia airily informed us, she knew and had nurtured personally.

She was a rotund, bustling figure with a pompadour hairstyle that couldn’t restrain its natural frizz. Her round, gleaming eyes seemed to gauge everything at once, her exaggerated gestures strewing potpourri cushions from her divans. Her house suffocated me. It smelled of old perfume and dust, damp soil from the jungle of plants in Chinese pots, and too many books, but she proved as fascinating as she was repellent. Her staccato voice rang with authority as she sat her guests at the overcrowded table and between courses of fowl and legumes, pontificated on a variety of topics ranging from music to the outrageous backlash in Paris against Cubist artists.

“Pablo himself told me he almost returned to Catalonia, though he detests it,” she proclaimed, jabbing her fork at no one in particular. “I insisted he not let his quarrel with Braque get the best of him or his considerable talent; after all, why should he enlist when Spain has no interest in the war? He must stay here and paint, which is what he does best, and what the world will one day appreciate him for.”

Before anyone at the table could respond—there were nine of us, including Cécile; myself and Boy; and Misia’s burly Catalan lover, the sculptor and painter, José María Sert, who grunted and guzzled food as if he were at a trough—Misia continued, “Which is why I insisted Pablo decorate the sets for Diaghilev’s new season. Poor Diag is beside himself that the Ballets Russes hasn’t had a single opening here since the apocalypse that was
Rite of Spring
. He’s had a fantastically successful tour in America and Spain, but he needs to return to his roots. Of course,” she added, with a tragic clasp of her hands to the very bosom she had refused to show Renoir, “Nijinsky’s betrayal was a dagger in his heart. After all those years of nurturing that ingrate’s temper and talent, the moment Diag turns his back, the scoundrel absconds to marry the first woman who can turn a blind eye to his penchant for cock.”

A thick-haired, gimlet-faced youth next to me giggled. “I wonder how
that wedding night went?” and as Misia gave a mock gasp, saying, “Jean Cocteau, honestly!” Sert rumbled, “How else could it go? ‘Darling, it seems you’re having some trouble down there. Shall I stick my fist up your ass like Diag used to do?’ ”

As Misia cackled in delight, I felt Boy go rigid at my side. Cécile arched her brow at me, as if to say she had no idea the evening would be so raucous. I wasn’t offended. I had heard similar coarseness in my days of friendship with Émilienne and her courtesan friends, but Boy’s jaw clenched as Cocteau mimed the aforementioned fist and declared, “Nijinsky will regret it. This new ballet
Parade
that we plan with Diag will turn Paris on its ear. A carnival spoof, with something for everyone, and enough subversion to please the rest of us. And Diag has that exquisite new dancer of his—I forget his name?” He turned to Misia, with an overt lewdness that made Boy glance sharply at him. A homosexual and open about it, too. Boy detested them.

“Who knows?” Misia shrugged. “There have been, and will be, so many men who love Diag. The important thing is, he’s willing to try it again. And with Pablo painting the sets, you, dearest Jean, writing the scenario, and Satie composing the score—well, darlings, it simply cannot be anything but extraordinary.”

I did not mention that I had seen the catastrophe that was
Rite of Spring
. The conversation, dominated by Misia, turned to politics and whether or not the Americans would see fit to assist us before the entire continent was doomed to eating sauerkraut. Boy said President Wilson would have no choice but to get involved, since Germany had begun to employ submarine attacks and poison gas. In fact, he assured us with a confidence that silenced the table, he had it on excellent authority that Wilson was preparing to legislate a selective draft service that would bring over a million American soldiers to fight in the war.

“We can only hope,” blared Misia. “The Germans are detestable. We should build a wall around their country that will keep them inside permanently like hogs.”

Speaking of which, her lover Sert had just pushed back his plate, belched without apology, and lit a noxious cigar that was making my eyes water. He leered at me, giving me a lascivious wink.